Irritable bowel disease, Crohn's disease, and Barrett's esophagus are just some of the gastrointestinal diseases that often require biopsy or tissue samples to be taken from the gastrointestinal tract. Often, a large number of biopsy samples must be taken from various locations in the gastrointestinal tract in order to properly diagnose the disease.
Various current biopsy forceps, however, are only designed to take one or two samples in a single pass. Thus, during some procedures that routinely require as many as twenty or more samples, the forceps must be advanced into and retracted out of the gastrointestinal tract numerous times. Such advancing and retracting of the forceps is time consuming, can cause trauma to the surrounding tissue, and can create sterility issues. Accordingly, a device that minimizes the number of advancements and retractions of the forceps by acquiring and storing multiple biopsy samples in a single pass is desirable. In addition, once multiple samples have been obtained, a method and device for sample removal that overcomes, for example, the tissue sticking to or otherwise being lodged within the device, is needed. Moreover, a device is needed that will insert into and out of a working channel of an endoscope without losing the samples or compressing the samples, damaging their integrity and causing a loss in diagnostic quality.
It is accordingly an object of the invention to have a forceps and collection assembly that facilitate the collection and storage of multiple biopsy samples, and accompanying mechanisms that facilitate the removal of the biopsy samples from the pouch while allowing them to maintain their integrity.